Nalates Urriah

Since you did not change anything and the problem started it is likely the connection. To figure out what part of the connection may be the problem see: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection. It is SL specific. This year the Internet started changing from IPv4 to IPv6. That means most of the hardware the Internet runs on is changing. That means every hour of the day companies are swapping out hardware and means Internet connections are constantly changing in quality and speed. Because you had a good connection yesterday or an hour agoe does not mean you will have a good one now. Use the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) to look at the region performance and connection. The article explains how. The connection should always be the first thing you look at. That can save you lots of wasted effort.

There are people taking advange of dual video cards in SL. While the render pipeline is still a single thread and OpenGL is awkward to push into multiple threads, several graphics processes have been placed in separate threads. A second video card can provide image decompression and reduce the work load on the card running the render process. So, there is some gain. BUT, don't expect to double FPS. Unless your willing to geek up and learn how to change the video options on the computer, SL is NOT going to take advantage of a second video card. You must force it to use a second card by changing the card settings. On memory... 64 bit systems do open up more memeory to SL. Several people were reporting use of the additional memory as the memory leak was being chased during Sept-Nov 2012. While SL may not use more than 2gb, which is unclear whether true or not, the Windows system had more memory to use while the viewer leak consumed it, thus allowing the viewer to run longer before crashing. Much more important than quantity of memory is speed. Faster memory chips are better, provided the motherboard and CPU can take advantage of the speed.

There are several things, I think, you are overlooking. Gamers love large screens, even multiple screens. The new video cards often have connections for 4 screens. It gives the immersive quality and improves aim in FPShooters. That crowd is not going to transfer to small screen devices. Professional creatives are using larger and larger screens. They are not working from iPad's. While the mobile market is growing that is from divergence as more devices divide up the market. So, it becomes a matter of specific demographics as to whether your audience is moving to mobile devices or staying with desktops. I think it is nearly impossible to know what the SL audience is doing because of the viewer requirements. Another problem with portable devices is storage space. It is not cost efficient yet. My SL cache is about 1gb. That is a pretty good sized chunk of storage on a 32gb iPad. Some get around mobile restrictions on storage by using a USB external drive, which sort of defeats the whole mobile thing. The next problem is render speed on tablets and mobile devices. Most are currently optimized for video streaming rather than 3D poly rendering. New rendering paradigms are in development. When one of the more efficient rendering concepts gets worked out, we will likely see 3D moving into mobile and tablets. Until then the high end rendering seen on desktops plugged into the power grid is going to run on mobile devices. It simply consumes too much power. Bandwidth with SL is another huge problem. T-Mobil is about the only service that provides unlimited data, but they slow your speed at when you consume 10gb. Unil the wireless system costs come down bandwidth consumption is going to be a problem. I suspect the Lab is aware of all the problems. I am certain they are aware of Cloud Party and its ability to run in WebGL, which runs on many mobile devices but not iPAD (afaik). However changes in June and some hacking allowed . (Note the USB power thing in the video)So, there is competitive pressure on the Lab. I am certain they are watching to see how well CP is received by the mobile crowd. I think it is too soon to see the Lab taking SL to the mobile crowd. They are obviously learning the tech in small bites with their other products, like Creatorverse. I expect them to wait until the tech is more mature to consider moving SL. They may possibly wait it out through a generation of tech and use 2.0 mobile tech in a year or so. Trying to move the huge SL system with all its complications seems like far to much to bit off. For now waiting, learning, and watching developements is probably more logical.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

These problems started in the first half 2012. In July they thought they had it fixed. See: #SL ADITI Fixed login inventory. Late in the year the ADITI backend system's hard disks started filling up. They were manually clearing them. Work started on developing a culling system to remove unused accounts ffrom the ADITI side. I'm not sure they actually implemented it. The system is complex. It isn't like a home system where a larger drive or more drives can be added. The Lab has ordered new hardware to increase capacity on ADITI. In the mean time you may be able to login using an alt. Alts can have minimum inventory. That seems to help. In general the fix is to change password and wait 24 to 48 hours before attempting a login on ADITI. Whether you login on AGNI or not doesn't matter. Changing password is trial and error. One keeps change passwords until it works.

Theresa is right. I'll expand on her answer. The animations for walking, flying, swimming, and more are built into the SL system. However the default animations leave a lot to be desired. So, people make better walking, flying and other animations. An Animation Overrider (AO) is a script that usually is placed in a prim/HUD that appears as controls on your screen. It checks to see which walk animation you want to use and replaces the default animation with your selection. ZHAO II is one of the more popular AO's. There are several out there. Viewers like Firestorm have AO's built into the viewer. There has been some debate over whether those are better than HUD based AO's. The Lindens don't see much advantage for the system in them. There is some, but not enough to move it to a priority for Linden development. For sex... AO's are not necessarily the best choice. Most sex animations are in furniture, thus the standard sex bed. The Sex HUD's are mobile and that is their main advantage. But, some problems with no script areas block their use. I think that depends on how they are made. It isn't something I've tested enough say definitively. However, sex beds can reduce the server load of running the scripts by having a uniform set of scripts for the region. Sex HUD's can require the region to load scripts unique to the HUD. So, lots of different HUD's with different scripts can add to the load. But, in general it is more the total number of scripts running in a region than the variety. An advantage and disadvantage of HUD's and in-furniture scripts is adjusting avatar positions. Because of avatar size confusion it is hard to get animations to work with the wide variety of avatar sizes. Also because avatar proportions, like long and short arms, are typically out of wack it is hard to make animations from different creators work together and with your avatar. So furniture and HUD's with his & hers pose balls from the same maker is pretty much mandatory. I get into the avatar proportion problems in: Improving Second Life Player Retention. Several articles cover the problem and solutions available to individual players. I link to them.

There have been a couple of different 3D viewers for SL. KirstenLee provided a viewer that had nVidia 3D and anaglyph 3D. See: KirstenLee Lee Viewer S21(8) RC 1 Release Review. New World Notes was discussing 3D back in 2009. See: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/12/second-life-in-3d.html One can see SL in 3D now with a 120hz monitor and a set of nVidia 3D glasses. I haven't got to try that yet. But, I hear it works well. The glasses are often on eBay for a good price. The anaglyph 3D is fun and runs on most hardware. But, one has to have a viewer with the feature and the color really sucks. Mircea Lobo asked about 3D in Oct 2012 in: Anaglyph / 3D stereo on normal monitors without red-cyan glasses? Unfortunately there is no new information there. In general 3D display is still new tech. Several ways have been to 'fake' 3D on a 2D display. Tech Crunch explains the different technologies in use now. The article gets into the dangers of 3D tech we have now and mentioned the warning that Samsung publicised about its 3D displays. Epileptics and others and experience seizures, nausea, and fatigue and it is not uncommon from shutter glasses. Since vision is a learned process the brain quickly adapts to visual perception changes. An experiement was run to see how quickly humans can adapt. Glasswere put on that inverted images, which also changes right and left. Our eyes actually invert the image placed on our retinas. Our bran makes sense of it and we see the world right side up. So, an inverting lense was added to see what would happen. Those participating found that is a short time, hours, until they reporting seeing the world right side up again. Wen the galsses were taken off, for a time, the world was upside down again for a time. No one has any information on what this brain adapation can do over time. The brain detects the change and confusion and tries to sort it out. Tech Crunch gets into the details of how confusing 3D images are to the brain and eye muscles. This is leading to reports of lost depeth perception after watching 3D movies. You can image the problems that may lead to while driving home from the theater. As I wrote the tech is new and its effects on the human visual system even less well understood. So, I'm not expecting to see the Lab invest much time in creating a 3D display for their viewer.

Giulio thinks he understands what is going on. He fails to note that the Lab is earning about US$75 million per year during a recession. I think that suggests he is just promoting his opinion rather than attempting to present an objective analysis. If that is accurate, then there is nothing to indicate his mind is open to contrary opinion or an interest in balanced dicussion. Since there have been no comments to the article, I assume there are few if any users of SL that read IEET. A few comments from readers of the SL Forum are not going to convince anyone that SL is vibrant and thriving. So... What would the point be for commenting on the IEET site?

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Without more infomation I'll guess you are running into a DNS problem. That has more to do with your ISP, computer, and connection than it does SL. Try changing your primary DNS server. Apple users quite often have DNS problems when attempting to connect to SL. The problem is fixed by changing DNS servers. People often change to Google’s DNS servers because there ISP provided DNS servers… well… they suck. Google’s tend to be really fast, which helps your systems performance a tiny bit. But, in changing you can create some problems for yourself. Some ISP’s place special information in their DNS server that is just for their customers. To avoid walking into those problems it is a good idea to keep one or two of your ISP’s DNS servers in the list. Add a Google DNS server as your first try or primary DNS server. A mix of DNS servers can give you the best of both. Also, some ISP's block the DNS ports to restrict their users to using their DNS. Colleges and such are known for that. It allows them to block access to sites. You can learn more about those problems: How to Test a DNS Port Some ISP’s configure the router to use a specific DNS server. If you ran software to install your ISP’s modem/router you may have that problem. OpenDNS may be able to help with that problem. Since this is just a guess, do a complete check of your connection to see if it is or is contributing to your problems. Read this specific connection testing for SL: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

The Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.0697 is behind. The 306.97 is several versions behind the current 310.70. The first thing to do is create a Restore Point. You can roll back to this point if anything goes wrong. Download the 8400's drivers and have them where you can get to them easily. Besure you are getting 64-bit drivers. I suggest getting the free program GPU-Z and checking your video card. If the computer has a built-into-motherboard GPU this should tell you if the computer has decided to start using it. If you are on a laptop, that is a common problem. If the machine thinks the 6200 is installed, it is going to be a problem. Click START and right-click My Computer and open PROPERTIES. Look for Device Manager, open it. In the Device Tree find Display Adapters and expand it by clicking the +. You should see only one dispay driver, the 8400. If there is another, try deleting it. Restart the computer and try a driver update. If that fails, try switching to the basic VGA driver. To do that, use Google to find out how to start in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode uninstall the video drivers for the 6200 and 8600. To do that Google 'removing old video drivers.' Once removed restart the computer and let it start in normal mode. It should be running on the WIndows Default VGA drivers. Now try installing the 8400 drivers. I suggest you keep a copy of the drivers. You may need to roll back to an old driver at some point. I have an older machine running an nVidia card and using the 169.xx something driver and it works very well. So, some old drivers run older cards better than the newer drivers.

The change in lighting is from the Lighting & Shadows setting. In video gaming parlance that is Deferred Rendering. That setting changes how lights render and how many will be rendered. In some clubs not designed for newer viewers, one has to turn it off to see. In some TPV's you can change settings to change how things render. I have a picture up that shows how using viewer anti-aliasing and video card anti-alaising lots and what it does to snapshots. See: IMAGE

This is a more technical explanation: Possible Alpha Layer Problems. You may see another change in how transparency works when Avatar Baking goes server side in late February. There is also additional information in the Wiki about invisa-prims and why they were replaced when Deferred Rendering was added. See: SL Wiki on Alpha Masks.

That Skydrive/iCloud thing can be a problem. I have neither and see the problem with uploading Physics models in the Dev Viewer 3-4-4-268156. I have not tried 3-4-5-268324. I can upload fine with the main SL Viewer 3-4-2-267137.

I've recently gotten two clients new i3 laptops very nicely equiped for under US$400. Outlets for refurbished laptops have some nice i3 units for around $250. Recycling centers that salavage and repair older computers have Core2 Quads for $100-$200. Replacement motherboards with CPU and cooling fans are $20 to $100 on eBay. Video cards 2 or more years old are cheap. If being in SL isn't worth $100 to $500 for computer upgrades that will carry you 3 to 7 years... I'm not sure why the rest of us should be held back for those people...

By the time avatar baking rolls out, it will have been over 6 months since the first announcement... The first rumors of the system leaked in March of 2012. There is nothing being added to the viewer that requires a hardware upgrade, at least with avatar baking. The pressure for hardware upgrades came when SSE2 capable CPU's were needed for mesh. Viewers were updating to SSE2 in June 2010. See: Imprudence Viewer Beta 5 Review. Viewers without the updates will show grey avatars or clouds. Otherwise, they will still work. If you don't mind a world with grey avatars, no problem. With about 2 years to upgrade and a contnious series of warnings about the need to upgrade, plus the general common knowledge that computers age and need to be upgraded, the current need to upgrade is not a surprise. I doubt we will lose 20% of users. I think a failure to update SL to better graphics and performance is likely to be a bigger detriment to player retention and merchant profits.

Did you find the wiki pages on best practices? #SL Best Practices If you are going to work with building this is an important article to check: Reducing Prim Count

Google provides public DNS servers. You can learn about them and how to use them at: Google Public DNS. People often change to Google’s DNS servers because there ISP provided DNS servers… well… they suck. Google’s tend to be really fast, which helps your systems performance a tiny bit. But, in changing you can create some problems for yourself. Some ISP’s place special information in their DNS server that is just for their customers. To avoid walking into those problems it is a good idea to keep one or two of your ISP’s DNS servers in the list. Add a Google DNS server as your first try or primary DNS server. A mix of DNS servers can give you the best of both. Also, some ISP's block the DNS ports to restrict their users to using their DNS. Colleges and such are known for that. It allows them to block access to sites. You can learn more about those problems: How to Test a DNS Port Some ISP’s configure the router to use a specific DNS server. If you ran software to install your ISP’s modem/router you may have that problem. OpenDNS may be able to help with that problem.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the Second Live viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's top menu: Help->About... and paste that information into your post. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Without that information all we can do is guess, which is likely to be a slow and tedious process for you.

If you do not own the region or property, you may not have build rights. In some cases you can rez prims and build. THat is common in sandboxes. But, there is often an Auto-Return for items not owned by the land owner. So, if the land has a 4 hour return, Four hors after to rez a prim, it will be returned to you. To see if you have been getting objects returned, look in inventory. There will be a Lost & Found folder with the objects you built. If you own the land it is very rate that the region will forget prims were rezzed. There is a small window ahead of a region restart in which changes may be lost. BUT... if things are working correctly, that won't happen. It is possible to lose builds and changes if the region crashes. Some regions have been suffering a memory leak somewhat related to Pathfinding. If you add prims at ground level the Navmesh must change. If you frequently trigger a Navmesh update you can very quickly consume the server memory and drive the region into a crash. The fix for that is currently running in the Release Channels. With any luck we will see them arrive on the main channel next Tueday.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Also see: System Requirements | Second Life. You need to look at several things before we can start to diagnose what the problem may be. Read through Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection whether you think you connection is good or not. The article tells you how to tell if it is you or the region server that is a problem. The short take on what you'll learn there is: Look at the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) and check Time Dilation and Physics FPS. They should be near 1.0 and 45. Look farther down to Network Time. The closer to 0 the better. Get a free program named GPU-Z. Look to see what your GPU load is. My nVidia GTX560 usually tops out at 40 to 50% with SL. If yours is hitting 100% or sitting at 0% then something is wrong in your computer settings. You can use System Explorer, another free program, to see what your computer is doing. It will show a high Page Fault rate if you are short on memory. If the CPU's are being overloaded that will show. If your CPU speed is down and percent of load high it may be cooling problem. SpeedFans is another free program that will read all the temperature sensors in the system. Good temps are in the 30 to 50C range. 50 to 70C is common. Above 70C check the manufactures specs. If you computer is dusty it may need to be cleaned to restore cooling efficiency.

There is an interesting series of articles by Penny Patton on her blog: The Digital Pasture. The second article has an item that caught my attention, the improved use of the Interest Tags found in our profiles. Penny gets into the ways the use of these tags could be improved. For various reasons I think the improved use could increase player retention, a major challenge for the Lab and current SL users. AS a merchant I can see how I might use them to improve my targeted advertising and get the right people to a store. Check out her article: A Critical Look At Second Life - Part 2 - "Bringing Content to People". I’ve provided my reasons for thinking these changes would have a significant affect on player retention in: Improving Second Life Player Retention, where I refer to that Chun-Yuen Teng’s and Lada A. Adamic’s published academic paper: Longevity in Second Life. See if you can see ways to improve marketing with the Interest Tags ideas. ----- The basic idea is to use Interest Tags in additional places in SL. Penny suggests in-world groups have a set of 3 to 5 Interest Tags. I like the idea of limiting it to 3. Whatever, the idea is get the group owners to keep it pertinent to their real interests and not spam on popular interests. When we ask for recommendation in our Profile rather than getting a list of strangers we would get a list of groups that match our interests. Events could have Interest Tags. If an event announcement matched a group’s tags the announcement could appear in the group chat and/or as an announcement. Perhaps group owners could specify how many tags it must match before an announcement appears. May be negative tags could be used to block announcements. Searching events could display results by order of relevance to your Interest Tags that match the event. Five matches would place it at the top and 1 hatch at the bottom. Locations could have Interest Tags too. When searching for places, clubs, etc., they could sort in Interest order like suggested for events. When asking for Recommendations in your Profile’s interest section places/location that matches your interests could be listed. Penny suggests this will allow one to avoid dealing with friend requests from total strangers as it is now. Instead one could travel to a location and hang out meeting people with similar interests. In that environment one could decide if they wanted to be friends. Events that match our interests would be events at which we could meet people. The Teng & Adamic paper found that the more chat conversations and friends a person has and makes, the longer they stay in Second Life. I think Penny’s ideas would foster more use of Interests matching and improve person-to-person interactions. If you think this is a good idea, post here. Or if you have a better idea based on solid information like the Teng & Adamic paper, post it here. I will be putting in a feature request and adding the JIRA BUG-ID when I have it.

As users, especially new users, and as merchants we often want to find people, places, or events with similar interests. The current Profile Interest Tags are a starting place. But, they have some problems. Penny Patton explains those problems and what can be done about them in: A Critical Look At Second Life - Part 2 - "Bringing Content to People". I expand on why I think expanded use of Interest Tags is likely to improve player retention in: Improving Second Life Player Retention, where I refer to that Chun-Yuen Teng’s and Lada A. Adamic’s published academic paper: Longevity in Second Life. The basic idea is to use Interest Tags in additional places in SL. Penny suggests in-world groups have a set of 3 to 5 Interest Tags. I like the idea of limiting it to 3. Whatever, the idea is get the group owners to keep it pertinent to their real interests and not spam on popular interests. When we ask for recommendation in our Profile rather than getting a list of strangers we would get a list of groups that match our interests. Events could have Interest Tags. If an event announcement matched a group’s tags the announcement could appear in the group chat and/or as an announcement. Perhaps group owners could specify how many tags it must match before an announcement appears. May be negative tags could be used to block announcements. Searching events could display results by order of relevance to your Interest Tags that match the event. Five matches would place it at the top and 1 hatch at the bottom. Locations could have Interest Tags too. When searching for places, clubs, etc., they could sort in Interest order like suggested for events. When asking for Recommendations in your Profile’s interest section places/location that match your interests could be listed. Penny suggests this will allow one to avoid dealing with friend requests from total strangers as it is now. Instead one could travel to a location and hang out meeting people with similar interests. In that environment one could decide if they wanted to be friends. Events that match our interests would be events at which we could meet people. The Teng & Adamic paper found that the more chat conversations and friends a person has and makes, the longer they stay in Second Life. I think Penny’s ideas would foster more use of Interests matching and improve person-to-person interactions. If you think this is a good idea, post here. Or if you have a better idea based on solid information like the Teng & Adamic paper, post it here. I will be putting in a feature request and adding the JIRA BUG-ID when I have it.

Oz Linden has looked at RLV for the SL viewer. There is no decision on whether to add RLV or just add some of the RLV features. But, they are considering adding some RLV capabilities. I think the Experience Permissions System has to be worked out before they take on adding RLV like features to the viewer. The features Oz seemed most intersted in were the ones that would allow better games within SL. These are features that would make adding game controls easier. So, there is a possiblity some form of RLV will get added someday. I've seen instructions for installing RLV into the SL Viewer 3.x. Sorry I forget where. But check the RLV site.

Smartphones and tablets do not support Flash. Before Steve Jobs died he explained why Apple decided not to support Flash. Google for it. More and more devices and browsers have given up on Flash. Adobe has a big investment in Flash. But, they have been falling behind in device support. I use the CS6 packages. They are trying to move users into cloud based software. Their installable software in CS6 has lots of problems and they are slow updating it. To get work done I switch back to CS5 Dreamweaver. This is some of the problem that Jobs complained about. The problem is Adobe has gotten fat and sloppy, IMO. So, they may continue to support and hype Flash for another couple of years. But, the industry is abandoning the Flash product. A number of people are posting their displeasure with CS6 Dreamweaver. More with the cloud computing idea. If your Internet connection is down you can't work. Dumb. Adobe has some serious problems. Flash is dying. HTML5 is taking over.